On a Roll, Bringing A Downtown Attitude

By JEFF GORDINIER

Published: January 25, 2012

CORRECTION APPENDED

MATT ABRAMCYK was obsessed with a seat.

It had the potential to be the best seat in the house. It was a stretch of red banquette toward the back of a lounge tucked beneath the dining room at Super Linda, the Latin grill that Mr. Abramcyk has been gearing up to open in TriBeCa on Monday.

If a young couple wanted to burrow deep inside a place where they could sip pisco sours and feel, for a fleeting hour or two, like a polo player and a South American heiress having an assignation in 1974, they might very well sit in such a spot.

But there was a glitch. As Mr. Abramcyk surveyed the lounge with members of his team, he realized that those winsome cocktail sippers would be blasted by the glare of the kitchen.

''The problem is that if you're sitting over there, every two minutes the door opens and there's a white bright light,'' he said, looking like a grunge lumberjack with a green ski cap pulled over his sheepdog thicket of hair. ''That bothers me so much.''

Should a lamp in the kitchen be dimmed? Should someone string a curtain over the doorway?

Such fine points matter a great deal to Mr. Abramcyk, a 33-year-old finance-realm refugee best known for his role in the loved, hated, gloriously doomed Beatrice Inn. The loud demise of that West Village club in 2009 helped send Mr. Abramcyk to the hospital, but it didn't derail him. Quietly building up a second act with a series of casual, curated-to-be-crowd-pleasing TriBeCa haunts like Smith & Mills, Warren 77 and Tiny's, the hulking guy in a knit cap has been working to bring a ''downtown'' spirit to a part of downtown that hasn't really had one in a long time.

Now he's about to put his track record to the test with Super Linda, an enterprise that has more moving parts than anything he has ever undertaken. The challenge: Can a former club kid make it as a big-boy restaurateur?

''TriBeCa has a ton of great high-end restaurants -- Corton, Bouley, Brushstroke, Jungsik -- but not much that's cool and not many with downtown style,'' said Erik Torkells, the editor of The Tribeca Citizen. ''There's very little along the lines of what you'd find in, say, Brooklyn -- little restaurants with scruffy personality.''

Super Linda isn't little. It's commodious and complex, with two floors, roughly 60 employees, 5,000 square feet of space, a range of ceviches and grilled meats, that subterranean lounge and a whole separate takeout operation. Overseen by John Martinez, a chef who is a veteran of the Jean-Georges Vongerichten machine, the heart of the menu is meant to replicate the smoky, juicy, charred feasts ''de la parrilla'' found across Argentina and Uruguay.

A jewel box like Smith & Mills prides itself on being compressed, intimate and almost invisible to passers-by. Super Linda juts into the corner of West Broadway and Reade Street like the prow of a South American schooner, a dramatic splash in the serene neighborhood where Mr. Abramcyk lives with his wife, Nadine Ferber, an owner of the Mick Margo boutique and the Tenoverten nail salon, and their infant daughter, Zoe Lee.

''It's a natural progression,'' said Serge Becker, who, with Richard Ampudia, mastered a fusion of taco-stand scrappiness and guest-listy exclusivity with La Esquina. (He and Mr. Ampudia are partners in Super Linda.) ''He did a couple of these smaller spaces. I guess it has to do with growing up. You get a little older, you want to do a restaurant.''

In spite of the scope of the enterprise, Mr. Abramcyk, a student of brands who has been spending time with the Steve Jobs biography lately, devoted the day to multitasking with a magnifying glass.

He walked into Super Linda that afternoon carrying piles of faded green Buenos Aires phone books from the 1940s. He had picked them up at the Brimfield Antique Show in Massachusetts. He placed them on a shelf behind the bar, as decorations.

In his eyes, there is a deft, detailed, theatrical, Keith McNally-ish art to how a restaurant is supposed to look and feel, whether you're sequestered in a red banquette or freshening up in the restroom. (The loo at Smith & Mills is, oddly enough, a thing of beauty: It was made out of a turn-of-the-century elevator, and its flip-down sink comes from a Depression-era railway car.)

''Matt sort of comes off like a beatnik,'' said Geoffrey Zakarian, the restaurateur and Iron Chef, who has chatted with Mr. Abramcyk about someday collaborating on a Midtown project. ''He's really not a beatnik. In reality, he's a wonderfully capitalist-thinking guy.''

A graduate of Ramaz, an Orthodox Jewish private school on the Upper East Side, Mr. Abramcyk studied business at New York University and pursued a career in finance in his early 20s. He does not have fond memories of that spread-sheeting phase.

''I just hated being behind a desk,'' he said. ''Just sitting there, looking at Excel all day.''

Eventually he dropped out, living on sandwiches and trying to figure out the next step. He pooled around $60,000 of his own cash and invested it in Employees Only, a speakeasy-style nook on Hudson Street. (He's no longer involved in that.)

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: A picture caption last Wednesday with an article about Matt Abramcyk, a Manhattan bar and restaurant owner, misidentified the bar where he was shown. It was Warren 77, not Smith & Mills.